Listen to This

Listen To This is a fragment of collective memory that finds critical relevance in contemporary queer discourse. Tom Rubnitz weaves narration, image, and a form of temporality dislocated from real time into a video where artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s loss, rage, and desire is palpable.

This document, not definitively finished or unfinished at the time of Rubnitz’s death, elicits various modes that trace their origins to oral history traditions: repetition, non-linear narrative construction, and disruption. In the video, Wojnarowicz sits alone facing the camera, infected with a plague (AIDS) that prevents him from abstracting his own mortality to some point in the distant future. He speaks to the present and in the present. Fragments of popular mass culture—Madonna, the Newscaster, a military helicopter—cut through Wojnarowicz’s impassioned performance, acting as visual prompts for the “diseased society” he has contracted.

Rubnitz constructs the work utilizing the aesthetic framework of the non-site of television, the dominant vessel for mass culture. He marks time and place through Wojnarowicz’s visceral attacks on Western power structures, and commonly held conceptions of the past and present. Listen To This is not an obituary, nor a memorial to its creator and featured performer, but a biting condemnation of homophobic HIV/AIDS policy and at large, the societal terms in which such death and mystification have become routine and necessary.

Co-presented with Video Data Bank (VDB) as the October 2023 edition of e-flux Film’s Staff Picks.

Video Data Bank began distributing Tom Rubnitz’s video work in 1989 and still today maintains its preservation and circulation along with raising awareness about its immense cultural and historical significance. Over the years since the work entered the collection, VDB developed a relationship with Rubnitz’s mother, and in the early aughts, VDB’s then Director, Abina Manning, and Archive and Collection Manager, Tom Colley, drove up to the northern Chicago suburbs to visit her and gather a car load of old videotapes that she needed to clear out from storage. Many of these tapes were raw footage, or copies of titles already in distribution with VDB, but a few stuck out as unfamiliar. It took a bit of time to catalog, research, preserve and digitize these tapes, but eventually Listen To This, made in collaboration with David Wojnarowicz, was identified as a “lost” title that had likely only screened once in 1992. It is uncertain if this single screening occurred before or after the month-apart deaths of Rubnitz and Wojnarowicz. Despite being the last known video work by Tom Rubnitz, little documentation and ephemera surrounding its creation has surfaced. A typed draft from 1989 of Wojnarowicz’s monologue, and a storyboard and shot list covering a portion of the tape’s contents, currently provide the entirety of the context surrounding this tape’s creation. This ambiguity also extends to the nature of the relationship between the two artists and the impetus for this collaboration.

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